Fearless: Apple's Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA

It has frustrated me that the media and blogosphere have always expected Steve to reveal at Macworld some astounding new thing Every. Single. Year. Or when he did announce the expected wonder-gizmo, it wasn't wondrous enough, even though it blew the doors off anything else in production as a 1.0 product. It's great that Apple is getting out from under that kind of unfair expectation.

Originally posted by 0megapart!cle:The Powerbook really doesn't apply to your comparisons. While it had a great history to Maclots, regular consumers just knew one thing about the Powerbook. It hadn't been updated in a while, and it was slow as fuck. Apple needed to shed that image, which is what they did quite effectively.

I think your notion of the PowerBook brand is based only on its very last years. When the PowerBook was introduced, and for many years after, it was one of the only laptop brand with mass awareness. (Perhaps not mass sales, but mass awareness.) The PowerBook essentially defined the modern laptop form factor: thin, symmetrical, keyboard pushed towards the screen, pointing device centered in front of the keyboard. Even at the end of its run, there was a lot of goodwill and name recognition in that brand.

I think the real question, is does an event such as MacWorld still have a place and if it does what value it provides to the companies participating? Also how does the value provided by a trade show compare to other events or venues, real or virtual? Also, how many companies were present at a trade show simply because they didn't want not to be there when their competitors were?

Only once these questions has been answered can you decide whether the move makes any sense for Apple.

One thing I see it that the presence Apple gets from the Apple stores probably outweighs the presence it gets from the trade shows. Remember Apple is thinking about themselves first.

Apple has realized (as has Mark Shuttleworth with Ubuntu/Linux) that it's not longer a matter of style or substance; now, style IS substance. In the 80's when Personal Comps came out, people just wanted something reliable. Once they got it, they didn't want anyone messing with it, lest it get broken. Now that things work relatively well these days (Apple has proven their stuff works pretty well), today's youth & movers-n-shakers don't mind change. In fact, if something isn't changing every now and then, THEN they start to get worried, because they fear it's stagnating. Apple's "reboot" of their public image, product line, etc let's their creative folks run amok and do what they do best ... reinvent the brand so folks feel like they're still working with the latest, hippest company. During the 2000's so far, everything has been about simple, clean look & feel, a lot having to do with the web taking off and good-looking flash movies using clean, solid colors for animation. Apple embraced that as their current image. But, who knows what the next "fad" will be. Apple may keep the same core innards on products, but as long as they keep changing the look of their product (and willing to risk doing so), they can actually be the trend setter instead of the trend follower.

EDIT: I should addendum this by saying today's people want the LOOK of things to change, EG: the product case, etc, but not the usability or the core software/functionality. For instance, Apple has re-designed their iPod look several times, making it cleaner and more elegant each time. However, the usability and functionality of the iPod line has remained relatively steady and reliable, save for some new features which folks have loved. Microsoft has tried doing this, but since all they produce is software, they try to keep it "new and fresh" by screwing with the User Interface all the time. This ANNOYS people, because the core functionality / usability keeps changing ... people have to create a new mental model on how the new software UI works. Microsoft doesn't produce actual hardware PC's, so they can't change the physical look of the PC, which is where Apple is able to set themselves apart in a winning way.

Wow I could put more bloated wind into that article unless I was the North Atlantic Ocean blowing a sea fairing frigate.

Most of us Apple/PC users and/or Techs that grew up with the Apple IIe etc. don't require a regressive history lesson as to why YOU think apple made the business decisions it did.

The choice to drop the "RAINBOW" (not striped) apple logo was one of PR due to the litigation between the Gay/Lesbian community who chose the rainbow as their so-called organizational flag and apple.

Apple dropped the outdated icon to avoid the continuous rhetoric of being called by the masses a "gay persons" computer and the strong chance that they would lose because you cannot copyright naturally occuring colors of the spectrum.

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PowerBook. IPod mini. The happy Mac. The 68k CPU. PowerPC. The iBook. System 7. And on and on. Great brands or great products (and often both), any single one of which most corporations would kill for. Apple treated them all like a past that it couldn't run away from fast enough.

Only a fanboy would say that these were great brands or great products. A true abstract tech would tell you otherwise. These monumental historical pieces, while being trendy, were anything but great which is why when Jobs returned he wiped the drawing board clean and started over. Even he new that apple needed the outstanding products that the prior superficial ones never amounted too.

Jobs chose a path for apple that would bring their products out of the stereotype college student, schools can't afford much computer and those who don't have a clue how computers work, forray to bring them into a more competitive business market that today's corporate yes man or technosexual would use.

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This brings us, finally, inevitably, to yesterday's Macworld Expo announcement. Though the Expo has been a big part of Apple's marketing and the Mac community for decades, with the eponymous Stevenotes serving as the most visible milestones of Apple's progress in the past few years, it's nothing compared the cumulative historical importance of the things Apple has already left behind.

If you had paid attention to ANYthing apple has done recently with their business decisions they you would have realized that apples past is EXACTLY what they are trying to escape and leave behind. Jobs no longer concerns himself with the company's past products nor does he view them as historical achievements, more like room for improvement.

The overall decision by any one company to vindicate themselves of a yearly venue is simply indicative of today’s economy, the need to streamline business and redesign the business model. When a corporation such as apple serves multiple venues a year including their own keynotes, why invest so much money in simply re-iterating those announcements?

This is more of a business decision then a product/announcement decision or lack thereof, which could signal a growing trend as companies pick and chose which of the many organizational hoorahs they attend.

Originally posted by trism:I would hardly say that replacing the iPod mini with the nano fits in with the rest of the examples. The nano was (is) a natural extension of the move from the original iPod design to the mini. The form factor got smaller and the name changed to reflect this. Further, I wouldn't say that the 'mini' or 'nano' part of the name is the brand, rather 'iPod' is the brand. And that, of course, has not changed since the original.

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It's kind of the Nintendo approach to portable electronic device design. Build it, then improve it and release a new version. It helps keep your product from getting stale, it keeps you in the news, and it lets you re-sell the device to some of your existing user base.

I like it as a development model, but I think to call it a bold move is kind of silly. They revised their hardware slightly and gave it a new name, and went on selling small, mid-range iPods just as they were doing before.

(Incidentally, this is why I always disregard technical arguments against Apple ever selling Mac OS X for use on non-Apple hardware: supporting all sorts of crazy hardware combination, dealing with an exploding number of device drivers, split hardware/software support, etc. There are plenty of reasons for Apple not to allow Mac OS X on PC hardware, but the technical issues are irrelevant. If Apple ever decides to make this move, they'll Just Fucking Do It, whatever it takes.)

Bravo, spoken like someone who has never worked on an Operating System in their life. You have no idea how things work, but you know APPLE IS DUH AWZOME, so they can "Just Fucking Do It".

The choice to drop the "RAINBOW" (not striped) apple logo was one of PR due to the litigation between the Gay/Lesbian community who chose the rainbow as their so-called organizational flag and apple.

Apple dropped the outdated icon to avoid the continuous rhetoric of being called by the masses a "gay persons" computer and the strong chance that they would lose because you cannot copyright naturally occuring colors of the spectrum.

Seeing as how they spent money (as well as Google) to oppose the ban on gay marriage doesn't help your argument, at least the second part. Neither does the fact that they always put style over substance. How many other mp3 makers do you know of advertise the fact that their new product comes in 9 different colors?

Funny you say that. I believe that metrosexuals would go for apple products because it fills their need for style. There are plenty of Apple users who are neither gay/metro, but seriously, they do look a bit sissy. I mean, look at their routers.

My theory on why they dropped the logo? It reminds people of the 80s Apple II and this is not what Apple is about anymore. OR, their new style is chrome/white, as evidenced by their laptops, gui styles and white LEDs.

Don't get me wrong; the ipod is nice and if they would add vorbis support to it, I would get one. Never will happen though.

Originally posted by Lemurs:Bravo, spoken like someone who has never worked on an Operating System in their life. You have no idea how things work, but you know APPLE IS DUH AWZOME, so they can "Just Fucking Do It".

Did you bother to look up what John Siracusa has written prior to this article before concluding "You have no idea how things work?"

quote:Originally posted by trism:I would hardly say that replacing the iPod mini with the nano fits in with the rest of the examples. The nano was (is) a natural extension of the move from the original iPod design to the mini. The form factor got smaller and the name changed to reflect this. Further, I wouldn't say that the 'mini' or 'nano' part of the name is the brand, rather 'iPod' is the brand. And that, of course, has not changed since the original.

The mini really cemented the iPod's place in the market. Up until that point, Apple had been trying to sell the more expensive white iPods with only moderate success—moderate as compared to the current iPod market, that is. With the mini, Apple finally broke out into the mass market. That year, as you started to see more and more non-geeks with iPods, you saw them with minis. The colors, the new shape, the reduced price, and the "mini" size and name were all tied very closely to the "hockey stick moment" (graph-ically speaking) of the iPod as a product and phenomenon.

But before the mini really had much of a chance to settle into its brand (and yes, within the context of iPods, there are significant brands: mini, Nano, shuffle, and now Touch) it was discarded. Everything about it was thrown overboard: the shape, the size, the colors, the appearance, even the name. This is at the height of its successful coming out party as "the iPod that made the iPod 'The iPod'"

So I guess what I'm saying is that we totally disagree about the significance of the mini as a product and a brand.

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Beyond that, though, a fairly interesting article.

Glad you didn't dislike it too much Wink

I don't doubt the significance of the mini on the iPod market (though I do stand by my brand comment, see below), I just don't aggree that by switching to the nano Apple was killing off the mini. They simply improved upon it.

Regarding the branding: I've never heard anybody refer to their iPod solely by the 'mini, 'nano', etc. moniker. It's always either just 'iPod', or 'iPod mini', 'iPod nano', etc.. I.e. the 'iPod' is what they're really referring to. In fact, on occasion I've even heard people refer to non-Apple PMPs (they exist!) as iPods. So I do think that the brand is 'iPod'.

Originally posted by trism:Regarding the branding: I've never heard anybody refer to their iPod solely by the 'mini, 'nano', etc. moniker. It's always either just 'iPod', or 'iPod mini', 'iPod nano', etc.

I hear it often, and it's easy to see why: with so many iPods around, there needs to be some way to differentiate. In my house, for example, my wife uses the model signifier exclusively: "Do you have my Nano?" "Are you using my Shuffle?" "Give me my Touch." (She sometimes calls it her 'iTouch' despite my best efforts. And yes, we probably have too many iPods.)

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In fact, on occasion I've even heard people refer to non-Apple PMPs (they exist!) as iPods.

That actually argues against your point and towards a future where "iPod" is the generic term and all branding is necessarily done in the model portion of the name.

Originally posted by LANolen:Did you bother to look up what John Siracusa has written prior to this article before concluding "You have no idea how things work?"

Yes, and he's a fine writer, but unless he's written and supported a generally available, consumer-and-enterprise oriented Operating System, he's just as qualified to make such a ridiculously unsupportable statement as G.W. Bush is. It was a nonsense statement, unsupported by fact, thrown out in a glib fashion, to lend emotional support to his thesis, which is that Apple is great, and reality does not apply to them when it comes to technical obstacles...like device compat is simply another design decision you can give to graphics designers.

Wikipedia records that USB 3.0 will have transfer rates of up to 4.8 Gbit/s (about 0.6 GBps). It will be decent enough when it comes in. FireWire (as it stands in FireWire 800) will become obsolete when USB 3 comes in.

Not so fast. . . I mean it, USB is not so fast.

FireWire 400 clearly outperforms USB 2.0 even though it has a nominal 480 Mbps. I've heard that USB's maximum throughput is 2/3 of the nominal speed for a given device.

FireWire 3200 has been approved so it should be at least as fast as USB 3.0 in real performance.

I hate USB connectors, and I hate that some ports are insufficiently powered so you just can't put any USB device anywhere.

It was a nonsense statement, unsupported by fact, thrown out in a glib fashion, to lend emotional support to his thesis, which is that Apple is great, and reality does not apply to them when it comes to technical obstacles...like device compat is simply another design decision you can give to graphics designers.

The point of that passage was that all the technical barriers so often cited against Mac OS X on PC hardware are surmountable, and that Apple has shown time and again that it's willing to follow a course that leads directly into extremely difficult technical challenges, and that it's able to overcome them.

You may find that contentious, but it's far from "nonsense," and is as supported by the facts as well as any statement about what might or might not motivate a hypothetical decision by a corporation can be.

The choice to drop the "RAINBOW" (not striped) apple logo was one of PR due to the litigation between the Gay/Lesbian community who chose the rainbow as their so-called organizational flag and apple. Apple dropped the outdated icon to avoid the continuous rhetoric of being called by the masses a "gay persons" computer and the strong chance that they would lose because you cannot copyright naturally occuring colors of the spectrum.

Can you substantiate that with some kind of link? Because on the surface it sounds absolutely preposterous. To believe that story is to believe that a) the "gay/lesbian community" is sufficiently equal to a corporation to be able to afford the army of lawyers to sue Apple in court and win, and b) the reason they could beat Apple is because they had a legally defensible claim to rainbow colors that existed before Apple's logo was designed! It's extremely difficult to believe.

It is far easier to believe that Apple changed logos due to the changes occurring at the time.

1. Steve Jobs wanted to imply a fresh start, including the idea of elegant simplicity.

2. The new logo matched the new design aesthetic Apple introduced to its Macs and the iPod: White, silver, black. Monochromatic. A rainbow logo would be out of place on those products.

3. Those who have never worked in the printing industry have no awareness of how freaking expensive the rainbow logo was to reproduce. At least in the early days, Apple insisted it be printed with six spot colors instead of four process colors. This dramatically increased the price of anything the rainbow logo was printed on, right down to the stationery. Converting to a monochrome logo, over time, probably saved millions of dollars in printing costs: an obvious move when you're trying to rescue a company on the brink of death.

1, 2, and 3 are much more plausible than "gays have an ironclad legal claim to some colors," unless you can substantiate it.

Originally posted by sprockkets:My theory on why they dropped the logo? It reminds people of the 80s Apple II and this is not what Apple is about anymore. OR, their new style is chrome/white, as evidenced by their laptops, gui styles and white LEDs.

My theory? Printing costs.

The switch happened right when Steve got back to Apple, and they were in frantic cost-cutting mode. And every single piece of official Apple anything: boxes, stationary, business cards, all had a tight registration 6 spot color special order print job required. They must have been spending tens of millions a year on getting that logo out in all its manifestations! My parent company at that time was a high-end prepress shop, and that's exactly the kind of job and customer they salivated over.

But the new logo? You can fax that sucker, even put it on a rubber stamp. Works in B&W, so any old laser printer can print it on blank paper.

Fresh, clean, new, break from the past, all great. But they also probably saved the salaries of hundreds of developers with it too.

What makes USB so nice is that every computer in the past 10 years has it.

But, aside from making things smaller such as with the Atom or nVidia's Ion, I yawn at new technologies. Wireless USB is DOA, no one really wants to go to bluray, 2GB of RAM now costs $15 and USB3 solves what big pressing issues?

(Incidentally, this is why I always disregard technical arguments against Apple ever selling Mac OS X for use on non-Apple hardware: supporting all sorts of crazy hardware combination, dealing with an exploding number of device drivers, split hardware/software support, etc. There are plenty of reasons for Apple not to allow Mac OS X on PC hardware, but the technical issues are irrelevant. If Apple ever decides to make this move, they'll Just Fucking Do It, whatever it takes.)

Bravo, spoken like someone who has never worked on an Operating System in their life. You have no idea how things work, but you know APPLE IS DUH AWZOME, so they can "Just Fucking Do It".

If anyone can port a modern OS to generic PC hardware, it's pretty likely that Jobs can see the hurdles and negotiate them. Remember NeXTstep 3.1?

That was accomplished, along with ports to SPARC and PA-RISC, fifteen years ago by a company with far fewer resources that Apple has now. You may want to broaden your horizons a little.

Originally posted by Lemurs:Yes, and he's a fine writer, but unless he's written and supported a generally available, consumer-and-enterprise oriented Operating System, he's just as qualified to make such a ridiculously unsupportable statement as G.W. Bush is. It was a nonsense statement, unsupported by fact, thrown out in a glib fashion, to lend emotional support to his thesis, which is that Apple is great, and reality does not apply to them when it comes to technical obstacles...like device compat is simply another design decision you can give to graphics designers.

If you have some evidence to prove him wrong, why don't you present it. "You have no idea how things work" is not an argument.

Anyway, you've made two contentions: that John Siracusa is not qualified to say what is possible (he never said easy) for Apple to do with their OS, and that only a person who has "written and supported a generally available, consumer-and-enterprise oriented Operating System" would be so qualified. Reading John's in-depth reviews of every version of Mac OS implies that the first contention is probably false. The second contention means that nobody is qualified to make predictions about Apple's moves -- the closest person might be Linus Torvaldis -- and that's pretty absurd, no?

Exiting Expo gives relief from the company having to come up with something to show, and tell. Now Apple doesn't have to do anything on a yearly basis and can slow down and come out with something reinvented once a quarter century.

Originally posted by Exelius:It took them almost 4 years until 7.6 to get it working reasonably well, and even then it kind of sucked at most things compared to Windows 95.

I dig the fact that 7 had many issues, but comparing it to Win95 is not terribly valid. System 7 was introduced in 1991, and Mac OS 8 was introduced in 1997. It was the tail end of the lifespan of System 7 when Win95 was in full swing and peak popularity, and it took Apple until 2001 and the release of OS X to recover.

By that comparison, you could make the same argument for System 6 to MSDOS.

The more accurate comparison would be System 7 to Win3.1x, which were released around a year apart, and I think almost everyone can agree that System 7 was a thousand times better than Win3.1x

Apple is, like any other company, simply just discarding things that no longer work for them. The writing has been on the wall for trade shows for a while now, it was only a matter of time before a company like Apple would run the numbers and find that it costs more than its worth to keep it up. They did this with the 68k and PowerPC CPUs, they did this with OS 9, and they will do this again whenever they find that something else can do the job better and cheaper than what they already have. Each and every change will be hailed as the new hotness; that's what the marketing department gets paid for.

Also, an aside about Apple shedding brands. Apple is in a rather special position that they only have two brands in the common lexicon: "Apple" and "iPod." Since every last model of iPod HAS "iPod" in the name, having the average consumer calling them all "iPod" isn't a misnomer, just not exact. But for the various Apple-made computers and laptops, just about every non-technical (and even surprising amount of them) I've heard calls every one of them an "Apple." Only a few call it a "Macintosh" or "Mac." And even less of them call them by their actual model names. Things like "PowerBook" or "PowerMac" or "iBook" just never made it into the common tongue, so tossing them aside to update the image hasn't dented brand recognition in any way. Whenever "MacBook," "Mac Pro," "Mac Mini," and "iMac" get retired, the brand will still have the same luster. Apple will get to drum up publicity over a new product while everyone will continue to say "I just bought and Apple." or "My Apple rocks." Everybody wins.

Off topic, but I just read the article about New Coke and the amount of energy people were willing to put into a fucking soft drink sickens me. 80% of people were aware of the change in flavor within 48 hours, yet I doubt 80% of people in this country even know where Saudi Arabia is. What a disgrace.